Salt Lake TV Columnist Admits Plagiarism

By: (AP) A former television columnist for The Salt Lake Tribune has accepted a demotion after admitting to plagiarism.

Martin Renzhofer failed to attribute a 180-word passage lifted from an Internet site in his column about an HBO documentary. A reader noticed the identical wording and contacted Tribune's reader advocate, said Deputy News Editor Tim Fitzpatrick.

"I wasn't even thinking. It was bonehead move. I'd never done it before and I definitely won't do it again," Renzhofer said. He said he pasted the paragraph from infoplease.com into his story, then forgot to attribute it to the Web site.

Renzhofer will no longer be allowed to report or write his TV column. Instead, he will be rewriting copy for the arts and entertainment section -- a job with less pay and fewer responsibilities. His byline is banned from appearing in the paper for a year.

Renzhofer returned to the newspaper on Monday after a brief suspension. He has worked for the Tribune, the state's largest newspaper, for 12 years and had never before been accused of plagiarism.